Monday, March 31, 2008

Beside working for IBM Eclipse Suppot Center I'm a PhD student and teacher of Software Engineering course at Poznan University of Technology. During the classes I often ask students to do some tasks in Eclipse (e.g. write some jUnit tests, refactor some code, etc.), however, some of them complain that Eclipse is hard and not intuitive to use. Most of them claim that Visual Studio is more user friendly and that it allows to develop code more effectively. They say that there are too many windows, options, shortcuts, etc. and that it is hard for them to start from stratch.I started wondering if we could do something to show new users that Eclipse is easy to use and that it has a lot of useful features. Are there any tutorials which shows how to use Eclipse as an IDE? Or maybe there is a need to create tutorials like this? Maybe there should be new UI elements added, which would allow faster start (e.g. Simply Java Project which would require to give the project name only)? Any other ideas what we could do to allow easier start for new Eclipse users (or at least for the lazy ones)?

Friday, March 7, 2008

For sure Eclipse is used in many context and environments. But I was quite surprised when I found it here. Although this is out of scope my current research interests maybe it will interest some of you.